gap that Ascham imposes at its center. Once the child has completed his initial translation, from Latin into English, the master is to “take from him his latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his owne Englishe into latin againe, in an other paper booke” (1v, emphasis mine). The hour or more that intervenes between the two Latin versions—Cicero’s original and the child’s imitation—during which the child is left alone with his own English, recapitulates in miniature the infelicitous gap of time, country, and language that divides sixteenth-century England from ancient Rome. What survives that lapse is an inevitably partial reconstruction, akin to “the shadow or figure of the ancient Rhetorique” that Elyot just barely discerns in English legal discourse (56v). Of course the loss of an original perfection is not the only problem: in the schoolroom as in the course of history, errors and barbarisms accumulate in the interval. The child, as Ascham confesses, is likely to “misse, either in forgetting a worde, or in chaunging a good with a worse, or misordering the sentence” (1v). As Jeff Dolven suggests, this “meantime” between tongues is “a window of necessary risk” since learning “depend[s] … on the hazards of the middle.”31
But such language is perhaps unduly monitory, for Ascham is surprisingly sanguine about the likelihood of forgetfulness and confusion, urging the teacher not to “froune, or chide with him, if the childe haue done his diligence, and vsed no trewandship therein” (1v–2r). Indeed such errors are what the pause of an hour or more is designed to produce; they are essential to the cultivation of eloquence. “For I know by good experience,” Ascham assures his readers, “that a childe shall take more profit of two fautes, ientlie warned of, then of foure thinges, rightly hitt…. For than, the master shall haue good occasion to saie vnto him. Tullie would haue vsed such a worde, not this: Tullie would haue placed this word here, not there: would haue vsed this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender” (2r). Lynn Enterline describes this friendly colloquy as “connect[ing] master and student via the student’s likeness to Tullie,”32 but in fact the emphasis falls on difference: it is only when he lays his own Latin next to that of Cicero that the child learns to measure and value the distance between them, only then that he perceives the countless tiny calculations of diction, syntax, arrangement, and style that distinguish eloquence from mere speech. It is this final act of correction that prevents the student from wandering off course, even as he cultivates his own expressive style, but the errors that will so often precede it are no less necessary or productive. Allow the child “good space and time” to complete the exercise, Ascham urges schoolmasters (31v, emphasis added). Because double translation assumes error as the precondition of learning, it redeems both distance and time, and the waywardness they enable, from their roles as the agents of barbaric decline.
It is not surprising that the “Tullie” who presides over these interlingual exchanges bears no resemblance to Elyot’s nurselike Virgil, who entices the child with sweetly familiar morsels. Instead, Ascham imagines Cicero as an “expert Sea man” who “set[s] vp his saile of eloquence, in some broad deep Argument, [and] caried with full tyde and winde, of his witte and learnyng,” outdistances all rivals, who “may rather stand and looke after him, than hope to ouertake him, what course so euer he hold, either in faire or foule” (63r). Ascham’s method allows the inexpert schoolboy to accompany Cicero on those perilous rhetorical journeys, with the full expectation that he will run off course in the attempt: translation, which Ascham initially champions as an alternative to travel abroad because “learning teacheth safelie” while the traveler is “made cunning by manie shippewrakes” (18r–v), in fact mimics the perils of foreign travel, recuperating the shipwreck as the point of the voyage. We might recall here the fable that introduces Toxophilus, in which a barbarian landlubber is persuaded to give up shipbuilding in order to confront his Greek antagonists on (literally) familiar ground. The Scholemaster offers a less stark take on the folly of meeting an ancient civilization (or its most eloquent exponent) at sea: imitation by way of double translation allows rude and hard-witted schoolboys to set themselves up in direct competition with Cicero and recuperates their inevitable losses as gain.
Ultimately, Ascham allows himself to dream of an England so enriched by such exchanges that even Cicero might prefer it to the nurseries of his own eloquence. Recalling that “Master Tully” once declared of England that “[t] here is not one scruple of siluer in that whole Isle, or any one that knoweth either learning or letter,” he imagines making a triumphant rejoinder: “But now master Cicero, … sixteen hundred yeare after you were dead and gone, it may trewly be sayd, that … your excellent eloquence is as well liked and loued, and as trewlie followed in England at this day, as it is now, or euer was, sence your owne tyme, in any place of Italie, either at Arpinum, where ye were borne, or els at Rome where ye were brought vp” (62r–v). Such a fantasy would seem to answer Elyot’s yearning for perfect intimacy with the past, for an erasure of distance and difference; but, in fact, it is precisely Ascham’s consciousness of his remove from that past, and of England’s inglorious place within it, that gives his fantasy its savor. The sixteen hundred years (and thousands of miles) that separate Ascham’s England from Cicero’s Arpinum or his Rome are here not the source of cultural and linguistic shame but rather evidence of a triumph—the triumph of a pedagogy that turns the “infelicitie of … tyme and countray” into time and space for learning.
Sallust the Exile
In Ascham’s fantasy of an England made eloquent, the natives speak and write in Cicero’s Latin, but he insists that a similar transformation may eventually be effected in the mother tongue. Indeed his first allusion to double translation, Toxophilus’s reference to the “other” method followed by Cicero, comes in a discussion of how best to enrich “the englyshe tongue” (xiv). In addition his gleeful rebuke to Cicero in The Scholemaster is prompted not by the improved Latinity of his countrymen but by their growing skill as vernacular writers. This is as he hopes and expects: the rigorous method of double translation, he writes, is intended “not onelie to serue in the Latin or Greke tong, but also in our own English language. But yet, bicause the prouidence of God hath left vnto vs in no other tong, saue onelie in the Greke and Latin tong, the trew preceptes, and perfite examples of eloquence, therefore must we seeke in the Authors onelie of those two tonges, the trewe Paterne of Eloquence, if in any other mother tongue we looke to attaine, either to perfit vtterance of it our selues, or skilfull iudgement of it in others” (56v). But when Ascham describes the results of that patterning in England, he has less to say about what vernacular writers do well than about what they now (rightly) perceive themselves to do badly: like the boys in his imaginary schoolroom, English authors are learning to “know the difference” between themselves and antiquity (60r). He applauds, therefore, the sentiments behind recent efforts to replace “barbarous and rude Ryming” (60r) with verses modeled on classical quantitative measures, but he is cheered less by results of those experiments than by the knowledge that English writers have, at last and at least, become conscious of their own barbarity: “I rejoice that euen poore England preuented Italie, first in spying out, than in seekying to amend this fault” (62r). That those amendments so far have yielded verses that “rather trotte and hobble, than runne smoothly in our English tong” (60v) is, to his way of thinking, further proof of the virtue of the undertaking itself: those who dissent are lazy homebodies who, for “idleness” or for “ignorance,” “neuer went farder than the schole … of Chaucer at home” (61v)—home, as ever, being the very worst place to take one’s schooling.
Helgerson cites Ascham’s misguided faith in English quantitative measures as an instantiation of a larger truth: “at the historic root of national self-articulation,” he writes, “we find … self-alienation.”33 It is this self-alienating investment in the authority of classical example, he argues, that later Elizabethan writers must learn to overcome in order to fashion English as a truly national tongue.34 But alienation and eloquence are more complexly entwined, both in the sixteenth century and in Cicero’s Rome, as Ascham
